Charlotte gave the Truist Championship another delay on Saturday morning. The forecast had promised better, and for an hour or two before dawn it looked as though the third round might actually start on time. Then the radar tightened, the marshals got the white tape out for the cart paths once more, and the players who had teed up their morning coffee found themselves drinking a second one in the locker room. Play was pushed to twelve minutes before nine. The leaders, Sungjae Im at nine-under and Tommy Fleetwood at eight, will not see the first tee until the middle of the afternoon.
Two days of weather have made a mess of what the Tour wanted from this week. The signature event the Tour positioned as the warm-up to next week’s PGA Championship at Aronimink has become an exercise in scheduling triage. The first round had to be split across Thursday and early Friday. The second round was somehow finished by Friday evening. The third round, now starting in threesomes off split tees, will end with the field strung across the course as the sun goes down. None of which is the fault of any individual involved, and none of which alters the fact that, on the leaderboard the broadcast actually shows you, the man at the top is Sungjae Im.
A familiar position
Im has led PGA Tour events before. He has led signature events before. He has led majors before. The thing he has not done, in five and a half years on Tour, is convert one of those leads into a win as often as a player of his ball-striking quality should have. The numbers from his recent seasons make the case. The strokes-gained tee-to-green columns put him quietly inside the top fifteen in the world. The wedge numbers are in the top twenty. The putting numbers are not bad. The wins column, though, has stayed thin in the last three calendar years on Tour, and the last individual title came at the Shriners back in 2021.
What Im does, when he does not win, is finish second or third with a Sunday round of one or two under par. The Korean is the most reliable producer of a 71-on-the-final-day-from-the-final-pairing in modern professional golf. When the leader needs to shoot 67 to seal it, he shoots 71. When the leader needs to shoot 70, he shoots 71. He does not melt down. He does not blow up. He simply does not press, and the player chasing him from two groups back, the one who has nothing to lose, plays the round of his life and overtakes him by a stroke. That is how the 2020 Masters ended for Im. That is how a half dozen Tour Sundays since have ended for him too.
The question this Saturday, then, is the same one that has hung over Im for years. Can he, with a 36-hole lead at one of the Tour’s eight signature events, on a course where the field has been thinned by Scottie Scheffler’s absence and the weather has flattened everyone’s preparation, finally play the kind of weekend the rest of his game has earned him?
Fleetwood, one back, and the rest
Tommy Fleetwood is the second-round runner-up for what feels like the third time this calendar year. The Englishman’s relationship with American golf is by now a kind of running joke, partly his own. He has been a top-ten player in the world for the better part of a decade. He has played twenty-two majors without winning. He has been in the Sunday final pairing at the US Open. He has chased Cameron Smith down the back nine at the Open. He has been in another series of contending positions on Tour this season alone, and the wins, like Im’s, have not arrived.
The case for Fleetwood at Quail Hollow is the same as it has been all spring. His iron play through Round Two has been the best in the field by some distance. His driving, never the strongest part of his game, has been good enough to keep him out of the rough on a course that punishes the bermuda rough as harshly as any on the Tour calendar. The case against him is simply Sunday. The Englishman has won eight times on the European Tour, including a Race to Dubai. His PGA Tour breakthrough has not yet come. Whatever the thing is that converts a 36-hole lead in America into a Sunday trophy, it has not yet, in the manner that anyone can predict, come for Fleetwood.
Behind the leading pair, the leaderboard has the look of a major weekend. Justin Thomas and Alex Fitzpatrick share third at seven-under. Cameron Young, last week’s winner at Doral, is at six. Patrick Cantlay is at five. Rory McIlroy, who shot a 67 on Friday to drag himself back into the conversation after a level-par opening round on a course he has won at four times, is also at five, four behind Im with thirty-six holes to play. Justin Rose, in the white-and-navy Seve tribute that the European players wore on Thursday and have continued to wear through the week, is at four.
What the compressed schedule changes
The thing the rain has done, beyond the obvious one of compressing the schedule, is take Quail Hollow’s teeth slightly out. The course, which on a dry week defends itself with run-out on the fairways and firmness on the greens, has been receptive in both rounds so far. Approach shots are sticking. Tee shots that would normally chase into the rough are pulling up in the first cut. The scoring has been a stroke or so lower than it would otherwise be. Im’s nine-under after 36 holes is a perfectly respectable number, but it is not the number a course playing at full firmness would have allowed.
What the receptiveness rewards is the long iron player. Quail Hollow has four par fours of over four hundred and seventy yards. On a firm week, the second shots into those holes are mid-irons from awkward stances. On this week, they are mid-irons from clean fairway lies, and the leaderboard is full of the players who have always done that work the best. Im is one of them. Fleetwood is another. Thomas, Fitzpatrick and McIlroy are the others. The course, in its softened form, has produced a leaderboard that the course in its usual form would also have produced.
The other thing the schedule changes is the body. The third round, by the time it finishes for the late starters on Saturday evening, will have stretched some of the leaders to thirty-six straight holes since dawn on Friday. The fourth round, on Sunday, has to begin with whatever recovery the players can manage in the gap. Im, who tends to tire late, will be tested by this in a way the leaders going into a normal weekend do not get tested. So will Fleetwood. So, for that matter, will McIlroy, who has had a quieter week than the headline writers expected and who would rather, if asked, be at home preparing for next week’s major than fighting through a third round that finishes after seven o’clock on a Saturday.
The major next week, and the one this week
Aronimink, hosting its first PGA Championship since the run of professional events that wandered through the Philadelphia suburbs in the years before the modern major calendar settled, will pull every player in this field to a different mental gear by Monday morning. The Truist, in the meantime, is its own thing. Twenty million dollars of purse money, three and a half million of it for the winner, a signature event with FedEx Cup points stacked at the top of the table. A win on Sunday at Quail Hollow is a win that travels to Aronimink as confidence, and a near miss on Sunday at Quail Hollow is a near miss that travels to Aronimink as the wrong kind of momentum. The leaders know it. The Tour knows it. Sungjae Im, who has carried more of these third-round leads into Sunday than any player without a major to his name, knows it best of all.
By Saturday evening the leaderboard will be tighter or it will be looser. The rain will have done its work or it will not have. The Korean will have built on his lead or he will be back in the chasing pack with the rest of them. What we will know, regardless of which of those happens, is whether the most consistent player in professional golf without a signature win is finally about to claim one.